2009. What an eventful year. Eventful in my personal life as well as in my SQA career. A good, eventful year.

I didn't blog much in 2009, 17 posts in all, and no topics that were SQA groundbreaking.  Yeah, I'm pretty much ashamed of myself and have watched my blog fall off peoples' radar.If I were to highlight my favorite post it would be my turn from SQA words to illustrations with Do Loop Until Zero. A hit or a miss, I don't know; I don't get comments either way on this blog. But none the less, it's something I enjoy doing. Hopefully you guys will see more of this "comic", if all works out well, it will be in the 1st issue of the new and upcoming Software Testing Club magazine.

Though the blog was quiet, my SQA and testing career wasn't. In the last year I had the ability to start filling a large gap that was present in my testing experience portfolio. Prior to 2009 I had no experience in the Linux world and the technologies that surrounded it. Joining a new group within GoDaddy quickly changed this. In 2009 I did a 180 degree turn from my beloved Windows world and submerged myself in Linux in an effort to test and automate a new, internal product. I was scared to make the jump, mostly because my Windows wisdom would be put to little use, and my lack of Linux knowledge would make me a slower tester and automator. Not so enticing when I really pride myself on speed and efficiency ("Hire me, Hire ME! I'm two testers for the price of one!"). Scared or not it was an awesome opportunity to further my skills, and help a 1.0 product using my experience with agile practices and automation. With the help of an awesome two  man development team, I was able to learn, automate and wade through the following technology highlights in 2009:

Product: A storage system (C, mySQL):

• I used PuTTY as an SSH client to the dev, test and prod environment running CentOS as a flavor of Linux
• I extended developer unit tests and automated API functional and boundary testing with Perl unit testing (Test::Unit)
• I extended PHPUnit to serve as an automation framework for automation of functional tests (use case, boundary, error handling,etc). The framework was named TAEL (Test Automation Ecosystem for Linux).

Product: FTP Server that uses the storage system (Perl, mySQL)

• I automated use cases, and FTP functions using TAEL. FTP functionality was tested using PHP's FTP  library. Validation was done through FTP responses, and mySQL queries.
• I performance tested the FTP server and underlying storage system with Apache JMeter. FTP in JMeter is not very robust, and worse yet forces a connection open, logon and close for every request needed, which is not very realistic. Thankfully it's open source (Java) so I extended it and tweaked it to fit our needs.

Product: User Management Web Service

• I automated use cases, boundaries, etc with TAEL. Validation was done by querying mySQL or parsing the Web Service response using XPATH queries.

Tool: User Experience Monitor

• In an effort to monitor response times on an ongoing basis, I wrote a script that executes basic functionality every 15 minutes, stores the timed results in FTP, where they are picked up and  processed by a chron job that puts the results in a database. Chron takes the results puts them into an XML format which are then viewed in a PHP web page using the chart control XML/SWF charts. We found some very interesting activity and trends through this test/monitor. This turned out to be a very interesting almost real-time QA asset for the team.

Product: REST service

• Automated REST service tests using the Visual Studio 2008 unit testing framework (MSTest, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting namespace)
• Created a .NET API for the REST service that would serve as an easy to use interface for automated testing as well as others wanting to use the service from .NET.
• Performance tested the REST service using my .NET API and Visual Studio 2008 load testing framework
   

Automation with Ruby: With a department wide goal that everybody must do a little automation, I led them down the path of Ruby/Watir (due to cost, and Ruby being pretty easy to learn). The results are looking pretty good, adoption has gone well and progress is being made. Here are a few details about the framework that I built over a few weekends:

• Uses a pattern that I call "Test, Navigate, Execute, Assert"
• Manages tests with the Ruby library: Test::Unit
• Uses Watir for web page automation
• Web Service automation is done with:  soap4r  & REXML
• MySQL database validation with the gem:  dbd-mysql
• Data driven automation from Excel using Roo

 
Process: Since I've been lucky enough to work with a highly motivated, small team of three, our process needs to be and has been really light. We've been pretty successful at being extremely agile. For project management we followed a scrum-like process for a little over half a year using the tool Target Process, but then moved to a KanBan approach with our own home-grown tool. Recently we moved from the home-grown tool to a trial with Jira, while trying to maintain the project in KanBan style. I have to  say that I really like KanBan, it works particularly well for our team because it is small. When you're as small and tight knit as out team is, we always know what each other is working on, so the more light-weight the better. It seems the largest payoff of these types of process and tools for our team is tracking backlog items as well as giving management insight to what we're up to.

What's in store for me in 2010? Well, I'll likely be working on the same products, but as far as major learning and growth opportunity I'm excited to dive into the awesome new features of Visual Studio 2010 for Testers as well as to learn and use some C++. Now, if I can just convince myself to blog about those experiences as I go.

A past article about uTest has got me thinking.

More than usual that is.

Specifically what has me thinking are these quotes from the article:

"...testers receive feedback and can gain in the rankings, just as with any other promotional network where individual users can establish themselves as authorities."

"Take this developing team model, and it can be applied to a great number of projects that can be rolled out on a variety of websites, allowing uTest to offer specialized niches within its larger network. One way in which this could become particularly helpful is for another one of its upcoming features: a Facebook application. This won’t be a Facebook app like all the others, but a testing platform for app developers. It allows testers to show and their their uTest tester profiles within Facebook (self-promotion at its finest), while also enabling testers to report issues and bugs via the uTest testing platform. This is in fact quite similar to what Facebook itself is taking on with its own Translations Facebook application, which is the social network’s way of better acclimating to the global growth process. Both new developments should work quite well for uTest’s platform, and I think this company has found a great way of letting companies leverage a dedicated, professional social network for quality assurance."

As testers we have a pretty good feeling of where we stand amongst our team at work and other teams within our company. But how do you think your testing skills rate when you compare them with another company, the whole state, the country, and better yet the nation? The notion of sharing your skills with the world is not new to me, but I think uTest and its feature of Facebook application is cutting edge. It's brilliant, scary, good, and bad. A couple years ago my first real leap into the social networking space was with LinkedIn.com, a professional network. LinkedIn.com has done me well. It has proven to be a fantastic resource...Especially if you know how to sell yourself. But beyond LinkedIn, as a Quality Assurance Engineer, I seem to be lost in the sea of other QA professionals. I've attempted to break out a bit with my blog, sharing testing tools I've written, posting advice on forums, joining a software testing club, writing a magazine article, and recently my first public presentation, but still... I am one among many.

It will be very interesting to see the dynamics that uTest ratings and feedback will bring for testers. Will I be able to use a testing rank to gain the edge over another person for a job in the real world? Could my rank be considered a real-time "testing certification"? In my opinion a "testing certification"  is useless without a governing authority, but if I have a good rank and a excellent feedback from 200 people is that a better or more acceptable governing authority? What if it works against me? It only takes a few mistakes, misunderstandings, or one jack-ass to throw off your rank (as seen with XBox Live). It takes a long time to get back into good graces once that happens.

We are definitely seeing a trend for career social networking on the Internet. Recruiters, Human Resources and hiring managers are using the Web to check you out now days (Googling your name, look at your LinkedIn feedback, forum posts etc). As a hiring manager, I wouldn't have a problem with considering your uTest rank and feedback as additional information to help make sure I'm making a good decision about hiring you. Scary huh? Granted, being a good quality assurance engineer isn't all about testing skills, but the more history and data I have on you, the potential hire, the better.

What are you doing to prove your software quality assurance rating in the social networking space?

I've scoured the Web for this 3 times now. For your and my benefit I'll store these hard to find links here for future reference...

Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition feature comparison:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts2008/products/bb991841.aspx

Visual Studio 2008 Pro and Standard Edition comparison:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/products/bb980920.aspx

Keep in mind this blog isn't just for you dear reader, it's for my overwhelmed mind too...

As I type I am downloading Windows Vista Service Pack 1 made available to MSDN subscribers. I've been telling myself for quite some time to grin and bear my Vista problems, give it a good chance, and finally: This sucks, but I'll hold out to see if SP1 makes Vista less annoying and less problematic than Windows XP.

I really want to keep you but...Do or die Vista. Do or die.

I do my best to try to hide my SharePoint/MOSS 2007 skills that I've developed over the years. Mostly because, well..let's just say SharePoint is not fun in my eyes, nor easy to manage. It's a very powerful and robust machine which can make it quite complicated to administer. And no matter how you administer it, you can't seem to make everyone happy.

On to the point of the post... For the life of me I can't find a nice structure and terminology visual aid to give to SharePoint newbies. I've needed this a few times in a meetings where we try to derive a usable taxonomy for the company and group. People get lost in the terminology which can pretty quickly knock the meeting productivity to lull. I did happen to find a small verbal  explanation by Mauro Cardarelli though. In an effort to keep a recent meeting inline I created a visual based on Mauro's definitions. Here it is:

Click the image to get the full size .png or click here for the Visio version (.vsd): Sharepoint_Terminology.zip (33.81 KB)

I laughed when I saw this today. Each piece of the pie is so painfully true. I have honestly gone through these phases/woes, over and over and OVER.

Track Santa's Christmas Eve progress
NORAD and CONAD (Track live, in 3D, with Google Earth)
GPS and Google Earth
NASA Santa Tracker

Write and Send Letters to Santa
EmailSanta.com (submit a form, get a quick email response)
NortPole.com (submit a form, come back 8 hours letter to view your response)
Santa-at-home.com (submit a form, get a quick email response)

Games
NorthPole.com
SantaGames.net

Wallpaper
NorthPole.com
OperationLetterToSanta.com

Naughty & Nice Lists
Claus.com
ChristmasSantaClaus

My oldest son Jake and I often spend our weekend nights playing Halo 3 online. We have a great time playing together and truly enjoy laying down some whoop-ass on others as a father son team. This weekend we spent a little time playing with the video and screen-shot features that are available in Halo 3 and came up with the following Father-Son Xmas Pictures. I tried to talk the wife into putting one of these bonding moments as the front of this year's Christmas card but it was a no go.

[Say cheese! (Jake is red, I'm blue)]

[Jake and I lighting Xmas candles with the rocket launcher and flame thrower!]

[Red and blue are our favorite Xmas colors!]

[Jake and I enjoying a casual cruise through the Xmas snow on our Ghosts]

[Sometimes we have little disagreements which end up in a sword battle. This disagreement was about if Santa is real]

[You win some, you lose some. Santa is real.]

[Jake and I flying like Xmas angels. Aren't we cute?]

If you play Halo 3 online look us up, we'd like to punish you. Jake's gamer tag is iSpartan710 and mine is Major Strange. Oh, and Merry Christmas from iSpartan710 and Major Strange!

Microsoft is doing a Visual Studio 2008 Installfest at various locations across the country!

What specifically is "Installfest"? Tim at Microsoft says:

"Want the latest IDE toolset and start developing solutions in .NET 3.5 using Asp.net Ajax, Silverlight, LINQ, Astoria and all the good stuff? What are you waiting for?  There are various Visual Studio 2008 Installfests around the country.  My team in the west is no different, but maybe you've been having a hard time finding them?  Here's a list for all those happening in the west!  please feel free to blog and spread the word. We're providing a location, install dvds (these will be evals because the finals aren't pressed yet), and food/drinks.  This will be a good time to get some questions answered, get VS 2008 installed, play around, and hang out with your peers.  Each registered and attended individual will receive a special code to receive the fully-licensed Visual Studio 2008 Professional copy sent to them when the full package product is available to ship. Don't miss these events!!!  Registration is limited, so get in now and mark your calendars!"

If you're in Phoenix, our Installfest is shaping up to be December 20th. Watch the AZGroups calendar for details.

Over at WebWorkerDaily there is a post on how instant messaging can make you more productive.  After reading the post and contemplating it a bit...I agree. For me, IM productivity boils down to self discipline. 

After thinking about the post for a while I discovered that I unknowingly have a few silent rules for IM engagement (when I engage), and IM pet peeves (when others engage and don't follow my silent rules):

When to IM

1. When the question I'm asking can be answered in 2 sentence or 2 responses.
2. When a question is too technical via phone and could be better worded through a pre-thought out IM initiation.
3. When technical information can be utilized by the IM client (e.g. sending a link versus trying to spell it out over the phone).
4. When you want to document the conversation for legal purposes or future reference (if the IM client logs conversations).
5. When the recipient is not in the building and you need to share your desktop with them because a visual is better than a long winded, confusing description (if the IM client allows desktop sharing)

When not to IM

1. When the IM subject is controversial or emotionally charged (in a bad way). Obfuscation of the text can only make things worse.
2. When what you are going to write would get you in trouble when viewed by others (e.g. somebody is standing over the recipients shoulder or IT logging it).
3. When the person sits within 20 feet of you (duh?).

A couple Instant Messaging Techniques

1. Do an initial IM to remove the element of surprise for a complicated question or issue, give the receiver 30 seconds to mull it over. Follow up with a phone call.
2. Send technical information (Web link) and call immediately.

What are your Rules of IM Engagement or techniques?

I made my decision about a year ago. The format I want to use is HD DVD. That's my vote.

XBox.com is offering 5 free HD movies with the purchase of the XBox360 HD DVD Player or the Toshiba HD-A3 DVD Player. If you buy the XBox 360 version you also get a copy of King Kong. A pretty sweet deal, however..

This whole Blu-Ray versus HD DVD issue is pathetic and vaguely familiar. Can you say BetaMax versus VHS? Why do they do this to us? I have a beautiful TV capable of 1080P and really want to get started on a 1080 movie collection but don't want to make the wrong choice and end up with a library of unwatchable movies. Yes unwatchable, as I conform to the industry and buy products that use the industry chosen format (video camera, video converters, portable player, etc) those movies in the other format will quickly gather dust. 

Sure, for home I can buy the LG BG100 that is capable of both formats and cover my format player bases. But I still have my problem...I really want to start buying high definition movies. I suppose by buying a HD DVD Player and getting these movies I am "voting" for HD DVD and this is my contribution to helping the industry decide on the chosen format. It just disgusts me that my vote could turn into a player that everybody will laugh at me for owning 2 years from now. But the bright side is that I'll have a beautiful collection of HD DVD drink coasters.

What to do? 

After some advice from my friend Alex and much research I decided that the SamSung HL-T5089S was the TV we needed. Sight unseen. I was able to partake in a killer sale at HighDefinitionStore.com for $1749, with free shipping. This TV sells for $2199 everywhere else. The sale is still going on if you're interested. I can't believe the prices on this site! Seriously, check it out. It's insane. These guys are the real deal. The site and company are a tad lacking in technology and online order processing but let me tell you: They got the job done. No gimmicks or BS, and they are quick.

Off the sales pitch and onto my story...Alex had told me that the new generation of DLPs are currently the best bang for your buck and my research revealed the same. Investigation quickly made it obvious that the Sony KDS 50A2020 (black cabinet) or 50A2000 (gray cabinet) and the Samsung HL-S5087W were the most loved in the 50" DLP class. Both TVs are sold EVERYWHERE. I viewed them both in the store and liked them both very much. I was torn, but I needed ALL the details before I made the final decision and started on my bargain hunt. Researching the 5087 on SamSung's site, I discovered that there was a newly updated model out, the HT-T5089S, but it can't be found in the stores (at least around here). I couldn't look at the TV so I needed to do an in depth technical review to figure out the differences. It took quite a bit of investigating but I was able to figure out that the slight differences between the 5087W and 5089S were:

1. 5089S has Bluetooth for wireless headphones (vs. no Bluetooth)
2. 5089S has USB 2.0 (vs. USB 1.1)
3. 5089S has HDMI 1.3 with CEC (vs. unspecified HDMI version)
4. 5089S Single Tuner PIP
5. 5089S Doesn't have game lag (as reported in the forums)

The average "sale" price for the 5087W in the store is $1700, $49 more for better features and claimed improvement for gaming lag seemed like a no brainer to me. I was willing to take the risk even though I hadn't seen the TV's picture quality.

The risk paid off.

This thing is sweet! I haven't seen anything in 1080P yet but Discovery HD has quite a few 1080i shows that look soooo beautiful. On the downside, I'm constantly reminded in a whopping 50" view that 98.75% of all the other cable channels' image quality sucks. Sucks pixel ass to be more specific. Pixel ass sucking aside, my son and I are looking to purchase an Xbox 360 in the near future (I've got a deal with him that I'll pay half) and we are really pumped to see what Halo 3 is going to look like on this thing. I'm betting there will be no pixel sucking going on with Halo 3. :)

Setup is easy. The remote is simple and easy to use. The menus are very nice looking and easy to use. The TV uses LEDs which means no color wheel, less energy and quieter (or no?) cooling fan, side view is great (10 degree more than the Sony 50A2020) and light coming through our windows doesn't wash it out.

The only Samsung HL-T5089S negatives I've found so far are:

1. The cable box remote codes in the manual don't work for the latest Cox Cable box (haven't checked for an update online yet).
2. I took me a day to figure out how to get back to the original setup wizard that I was prompted with when I initially turned the TV on. Turns out it was a main menu item entitled "Plug & Play". Maybe I'm just stupid, but "Plug & Play" on my TV didn't click with me as a setup type item on my TV. This term is bad for TVs and its Microsoft history doesn't help it either.
3. Lying on the floor and looking up at it looks bad (it sits on a 24" cabinet"). Certain colors have a lighter color shadow. However, sitting on a couch 8 feet away and slightly lower than the TV the problem isn't seen. 

If you're in the 50" market and you're not mounting your TV to the wall or caring how much of the entertainment cabinet depth you consume (HL-T5089S is 13.4 inches deep!) then I recommend this TV. If this isn't the TV you want then I still recommend HighDefinitionStore.com for a great deal. 

Since its creation QAInsight.net has been hosted from an underpowered pizza box lying on the floor, under my desk, in my office at home. The recent move to Arizona has caused some moving around and downtime. It's been down this last week while I putzed around with getting it to work from the new office closet with my new Internet provider Cox Cable. Cox blocks incoming ports (and so does Verizon Fios) which makes hosting a Web site a little challenging, but not impossible. The providers say that it's for security reasons, and there is some truth to that, but for those of us who understand those security reasons...well, port blocking is just a huge pain in the ass. If you don't understand the security issues stop reading and go pay a professional to host your site. Perhaps somebody like GoDaddy.com.

If you're still reading... My research on the Internet regarding this subject led to many forums and articles with people having the problem of not being able to host a site at home but no specific directions on how to make it happen. Today, I hope to help you make it happen. Beat the system..You know... stick it the man. Keep in mind your Internet provider, modem, router, Web server may not be the same as mine but I'll try to keep things as generic as possible so that you can try to apply it so your situation. Forgive me for the things that are wrong that I am about to divulge, for I suck at networking. Proceed at your own risk.

WARNING: You could screw things up! WARNING: The traffic to your site could cause your ISP to cancel your service.

And awaaaay we go:

Things needed

1. An Internet provider. Cable, DSL, or FIber. Dial-up isn't going to work.
2. A router. You'll need one that is capable of IP forwarding and Web Forwards. I use the NetGear RangeMax Next -WNR854T (mostly because my internal wired network is Gigabit).
3. A domain name. GoDaddy.com is the best place to get one of these. I recommend you get something cool like MyPimpNutz.com or MyPrettyPony.tv to establish your presence on the dub dub dub.

For simplicity let's start with the 10,000 foot view:

1. You Domain Name talks to a Dynamic DNS service.
2. The Dynamic DNS service points to the IP on your modem, and if your ISP blocks ports it will also forward the request to the modem using a different port #.
3. Your modem forwards to your router and your router forwards to your internal web server.
4. Your web server receives the request at the port with the specified header and processes it.
   

Simple enough from that point of view eh? Okay, here's the detail (not so simple):

1. Go find out what ports your Internet provider blocks. You'll probably get lost in their maze of a website so just Google it, e.g. "List of blocked ports for Verizon Fios". Write them down. In my experience Cox Cable and Verizon Fios block port 80 (the one we care about for the purpose of this post) Comcast does not. If your ISP doesn't block ports then you won't need to worry about the "Web Forward" instructions in this post.
2. On your Router
1. Logon to your router
2. Make sure your router has DHCP turned on, if not, turn it on.
3. Make sure the option to get the Internet IP Address is set to "Get Dynamically from ISP"
4. If you can, setup the LAN TCP/IP IP address and IP Subnet Mask. Make these 192.168.1.1 and 255.255.255.0
5. Find the feature for "Port forwarding". Add a new port forwarding rule, if your ISP does not block port 80 then make the start and end port 80 and the server IP address 192.168.1.10 (you will specify this in the Web Server portion of this article). If you provider does block port 80 then do the same thing but use 8080 (or any port that they do not block).
6. Find a page with the router status. Write down the IP address of the router (LAN port, 192.168.1.1), the IP Subnet Mask (LAN port, 255.255.255.0), the IP address of the modem (Internet port) , and the Domain Name Server (Internet port)
   Things should look kind of like this when you're done:
   
   
3. On your Web Server: Logon to your web server.
   Setup the TCP/IP properties on the local area connection:
1. Logon to your Web server
2. Setup the TCP/IP properties on the local area connection:
1. Enable "Use the following IP Address"
2. Give it a static IP Address 192.16.1.10 (or something other than your router IP address)
3. Give it a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (the same subnet mask you gave your router)
4. Give it a default gateway of 192.168.1.1 (this is the IP Address you gave your router)
5. Enable "Use the following DNS server address" and for the "Preferred DNS Server" input the IP address of the "Domain Name Server" that you wrote down from the router
   All said and done it should look something like this:
   
   
4. Dynamic DNS
1. Go sign up for dynamic DNS (free) at ZoneEdit.com. 
2. Log in to your account and click "Add zones" 
3. Enter the domain name that you want DNS services for and click "add"
4. A pair of name servers will be assigned to you
5. Contact your registrar (people that sold you the domain name, GoDaddy.com in my case) and tell them to change the name servers for your domain or logon to your account at your registrar and change them yourself.
6. Wait approximately 1 day for this change to take place. But in the meantime...
7. If you determined that your ISP IS NOT blocking port 80 then proceed (otherwise skip to sub-step 6):
1. Click on the link  "IP Addresses (A)"
2. For the "name" textbox type in *.yourDomain.com (type in your domain name). Using *. will cover the case where people come in with and without the www.
3. Input the IP Address that was specified in the router as your "Internet Port" (in other words the IP address assigned to your modem from you ISP)
4. Click the "Change" button.
5. Click the "View" link at the top of the page and make sure the IP Addresses section contains the entry you just input
   It should look something like this:
   
   
   
   
   If you determined that your ISP IS blocking port 80 (and you skipped sub-step 1-5) then:
6. Click the link "WebForward"
7. In the "New Domain" textbox type in your domain name, without the www. (e.g. qainsight.net)
8. In the "Destination" textbox type the following: http://www1.yourDomainName.com:8080
9. Do not enable "Cloaked"
10. Click the "Add New" button
11. Click on the link  "IP Addresses (A)"
12. For the "name" textbox type in *.yourDomain.com (type in your domain name)
13. Input the IP Address that was specified in the router as your "Internet Port" (in other words the IP address assigned to your modem from you ISP)
14. Click the "Change" button.
15. Click the "View" link at the top of the page and make sure the WebForward and  IP Addresses section contains the entries you just input
    It should look something like this:
    
    
5. Okay! We're close to being done. Now go logon to your Web server
1. Open up Internet Information Server (IIS Manager)
2. Expand the server name node
3. Expand the "Web Sites" node
4. Right mouse click your web site (assuming you've set this up already)
5. Under the "Web Site" tab click Advanced
6. Click the "Add" button
7. Select the IP Address for server (192.168.1.10 is mine)
8. Enter the "TCP Port" of 8080
9. Enter the "Host Header Value" of: www1.yourDomainName.com (yourDomainName is your domain name!)
10. That's it. Other things need to properly get a site to display I'll leave to you (default pages, application pools, etc)

There you have it. Don't forget it will take a minimum of 24 hours before the name servers are set and propagated, so you're not going to see instant results if you did this all in one day. If it doesn't work, double and triple check all your settings to make sure they stuck. Watch for the redirect from www to www1 in the browser. If you get an error and no redirect  to www1, look at your name server and Dynamic DNS settings. If you get the redirect to www1 but the page doesn't display then look at the web page, application, or IIS settings.

What to do if your IP changes...Change the IP entries at ZoneEdit.com. There are tools that detect the changes and update this automatically for you but I've never had to do that since my IP typically updates about once a year which hasn't warranted me investigating the tool.

Last but not least...Enjoy the convenience and availability of your Web site hosted from home!

For about 2 1/2 years now my wife and I have been keeping a blog for our son Jace. Over at JaceDaniel.com  (notice how all the post images are broken when you go there)  we document the life of Jace and post pictures for 2 reasons:

1. So we can easily share with family
2. Now, 20 years from now, and hopefully forever Jace will have an online "baby book"

In my mind, number 2 being the most important. Why number 2 is such a big deal to me is because my Mom put together and kept 5 baby books for me, from birth to about 13 years old, and those baby books mean a lot when you get older and want to reflect on your past. I want to do the same for my son.

In pursuit of the same but a little more cutting edge than the modern day scrap-booking, I figured the online blog format was the best way to go but needed an image sharing solution. I chose DasBlog for the blog and nGallery for the image sharing solution. Both open source.

DasBlog rocks, it's a great piece of software with truly dedicated and talented people. nGallery on the other hand... Well it was a great piece of software, it did exactly what I needed but then it was taken over by Community Server and now it is NOT part of the open source/free world.

So here is my issue. This last week I upgraded JaceDaniel.com to DasBlog 2.0  which uses .Net 2.0 but my open source nGallery uses .Net 1.1. I am unable to get both the .Net 2.0 and .Net 1.1 applications  to play nicely in the same sandbox. Even with their own vdirs and application pools. So, now I have a blog/baby book with broken references to a .Net 1.1 nGallery picture gallery. Trying to keep up with the latest in technology hosed me. Suck. So much for a baby book to last decades.

The reality of it is that when I started the blog I didn't put much thought into how to make an online application/baby book last forever. I am now...I need a solution. Something that will be there when my son is old enough to care. Even if I found a way to fix the problem at hand I am still worried about the future.  What if DasBlog sells out and 10 years from now I'm forced into .Net 8.0 with no backwards compatibility? Screwed again.

What do I do?

Pay for a service? How do I know if they'll be there in 20 years?

Build and manage my own applications? I don't have the time.

Am I stupid to put our precious memories on the Internet?

Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman convinced me that running ReadyBoost on Vista was the way to go and they were right. Running ReadyBoost has increased my system performance quite a bit. I set myself up with the Apacer 2GB Handy Steno and saw the gains immediately. ReadyBoost works and it... feels better.  My click and wait is gone.

After about a week of running and loving ReadyBoost I rebooted my PC. It was not happening. Reboot denied. Nothing but a crisp, black & white, you lose, sorry, no way message of: "Invalid or damaged bootable partition". Being a week later, ReadyBoost wasn't in the front of my mind so the heart skipped a few beats while my troubleshooting mind raced to and fro. Seconds later, I re-reminded myself of the ReadyBoost change, yanked the drive, and rebooted. No more error message. What the?

My fix... I turned off the USB Boot feature in the boot options of my system BIOS. The other USB drives attached to my PC don't have this problem but the ReadyBoost drive does for some reason. Oh well. Easy fix.

Listening to music at work consists of two services for me MSN Radio and Pandora; both completely different services, both keeping my ears fairly happy. I started with MSN Radio and after a while realized that the songs repeated about halfway through the work day on any specific genre station. Listening to the MSN Local Sounds station gave me a bit more variety but it still repeated and it was only refreshed with new music once a week. Bored of the same ol' same ol', I turned to Pandora to build my own customized radio stations with bands and songs that I like. Pandora allowed me to build stations that I entitled "Space Rock" or "Chick Singers" for example. Pretty cool but the music would also get old after a couple of days if I didn't give a thumbs up to a few new relevant bands it offered up as "Space Rock" or "Chick Singers". Over time, I found myself switching between the two; Pandora for one day, MSN Radio another, and switching stations after I came back to Pandora and then MSN Radio.

I guess the people at MSN Radio were reading my mind and recognized the benefits of Pandora because they have teamed up with them and now have the Pandora service available on MSN Radio. The service is free, but a subscription will get rid of the ads. To add to an already sweet offering, the MSN Radio service is free now...ALL STATIONS.

The two services aren't integrated together and I'm not sure if that's in the big picture for MSN Radio. Currently MSN Radio opens up in Media Player, while using Pandora opens the Pandora player in web browser. It'd be nice to see these two things melded together within Media Player and to have Pandora station building with MSN Radio stations. Just a wish... I'll be content with what they've given me so far. Baby steps...Thanks MSN Radio!

It sure is a challenge to find the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. Why does Microsoft make it so hard to find? You can download it here (thanks Matt).

I was hoping to find a version of SysDiff on it for Server 2003. No such luck. After getting a version of SysDiff here I attempted to run it on Server 2003 and... it doesn't work. Microsoft wants you to use Wininstall LE now.

Wininstall doesn't seem to be all that. I need a tool that I can take system snapshots (before and after an application installation), compare and report the differences. I'd like to track the following changes on Server 2003:

• Files
• Folders
• Registry
• Users
• Groups
• Permissions
• Wishful thinking: SQL 2000 and 2005 schema changes

I've found WinAlysis and it seems promising. What tool do you use?

This morning I took my son to the dentist for his semi-annual cleaning and my brought my laptop along to get some casual white paper reading done while I waited. After firing the ol' IBM up, much to my surprise I realized that Smiles Northwest had free wireless access. Sweet! I quickly resumed my normal testing schedule by VPNing in to work, doing a remote desktop connection to my test machine and then started testing away. Gawd I heart technology. Testing from the dentist's office...Heh.

BTW, for what it's worth Dr. Montrose and the staff @ Smiles Northwest are GREAT. If you're in the Portland/Beaverton/Hillsboro area I highly recommend them.

I recently had the privelege to explore a SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 upgrade for one of our Web applications, and in the same breath an upgrade from the .NET 1.1 framework to .NET 2.0...

I'll talk about the specifics that I learned during the SQL upgrade another time, but I ran into only one issue during my 1.1 to 2.0 upgrade process. The issue wasn't even really an .NET framework issue.

Long story short, my lesson learned was essentially establish that the app works before the upgrade. Duh, can you say BASELINE? What threw me for a loop which led me astray is that the .NET 2.0 led me to believe that I had a SQL 2005 configuration issue:

Error With .NET 2.0
Exception=System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server.  When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)

To troubleshoot, I rolled back to .NET 1.1 with SQL 2000 and saw:

Error With .NET 1.1
Exception=System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

Interesting, so I didn't have a SQL 2005 OR .NET 2.0 problem. The issue? I learned that the above errors occur when:

1. SQL not started (duh, that wasn't my problem though)
2. IPSEC configured incorrectly (my problem)

The fix:
1. Start SQL Server
2. Configure IPSEC so that the servers  can be pinged successfully in both directions (Web server to SQL and SQL to Web server)

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I have nothing better to do right now. Err... Or...While Googling on my SQL 2005 error I found some great SQL Server 2005 connection troubleshooting links. If you're stuck with SQL 2005 connection issues here are three some references to check out:

Troubleshoot Connectivity Issue in SQL Server 2005 - Part I

Troubleshoot Connectivity Issue in SQL Server 2005 - Part II

Troubleshoot Connectivity Issue in SQL Server 2005 - Part III

Even Better, just use this site/search

I know this is old but I like to run it against my sites every once in a while to have myself a little chuckle. View QAInsight in Jive here. Translate your site into Jive here.

About a month ago I posted about how NUnit fails with SystemIOFileNotFoundException. This month Noah left a comment stating "A malformed xml file screwed me up too. You saved me hours of my life."

Hell yeah! My blogging did somebody some good! I love it! This is what I want to see... This is what I want to hear.

As far as I figure you peeps think I'm in it for the Google Adsense revenue but... REALLY I'm not. Yes, the revenue is nice and has paid for my car, bike, house, dog, and the wife's boob job (super-duper thanks for that by the way), but I'm not materialistic like that. I'm doing this for you peeps...

Google Adsens Revenue for 10 months of blogging: $108.71 (Have you seen my car? Not gonna touch the boob thing). 

Helping somebody via a blog post: priceless 

Thanks for the comment Noah.

The formerly known Atlas is now ASP.NET AJAX and was released as v1.0 Beta last week. You can download the free framework here. The accompanying site has quite a few "How Do I" videos that show off the framework and guide you through using some of the features. See the video list here. I watched the 18 minute video entitled  Developing ASP.NET 2.0 Applications using AJAX and was impressed with the simplicity of developing with ASP.NET AJAX.

Ben the "Virtual PC Guy" tells us that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Beta is out. Get the feature list over on his blog. Sign up for the VPC 2007 beta here.

I spend a large portion of my QA day using VPC 2004, so I'm pretty excited, and SCARED, to see what 2007 will do for me. My hopes are high that the performance improvements will make my testing experience faster. Please? Please. PLEASE!

SPI Dynamics (known for being experts in security for Web applications) has released a white paper on the dangers of Ajax. It's a worthy and quick read if you are doing any testing or development with AJAX. Get the paper here.

I've seen a lot of activity and focus on implementing secure Ajax solutions, which is a great thing, but I'm telling you people...it's dangerous if not done right. The more I read and play with it the more I think:

"Ajax...the new, great way to exploit".

"Bad Ajax implementations...A phishers dream!"

Yeah, yeah... I don't want to hear your "The technologies used in Ajax aren't new" crap. The technologies aren't, but the focus is.

"Defect of the day" is going to be dubbed "Bug of the day" today and the prestigious award goes out to fellow blogger Dror Engel with this bug found on Google:

What seemed to be out of the blue, NUnit started failing on me yesterday when I attempted to load my project. The cryptic error was:

System.IO.FileNotFoundException : File or assembly name nunit.core, or one of its dependencies, was not found.

Exception details are found at the bottom of the post. The problem? The web.config that went along with my assembly wasn't valid because I was missing a trailing quote:

<add key="blah" value="missingquote />

Ooops. Thanks for the uninformative error message NUnit. That's a half hour of my life I'll never get back....

System.IO.FileNotFoundException...

Server stack trace:
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Boolean isStringized, Evidence assemblySecurity, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Boolean stringized, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
   at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(String assemblyString, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
   at System.Activator.CreateInstance(String assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, Evidence securityInfo, StackCrawlMark& stackMark)
   at System.Activator.CreateInstance(String assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, Evidence securityInfo)
   at System.AppDomain.CreateInstance(String assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, Evidence securityAttributes)
   at System.AppDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap(String assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, Evidence securityAttributes)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.StackBuilderSink.PrivateProcessMessage(MethodBase mb, Object[] args, Object server, Int32 methodPtr, Boolean fExecuteInContext, Object[]& outArgs)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.StackBuilderSink.SyncProcessMessage(IMessage msg, Int32 methodPtr, Boolean fExecuteInContext)

Exception rethrown at [0]:
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.HandleReturnMessage(IMessage reqMsg, IMessage retMsg)
   at System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.RealProxy.PrivateInvoke(MessageData& msgData, Int32 type)
   at System.AppDomain.CreateInstanceAndUnwrap(String assemblyName, String typeName, Boolean ignoreCase, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Object[] args, CultureInfo culture, Object[] activationAttributes, Evidence securityAttributes)
   at NUnit.Util.TestDomain.MakeRemoteTestRunner(AppDomain runnerDomain)
   at NUnit.Util.TestDomain.Load(String assemblyFileName, String testFixture)
   at NUnit.Util.TestLoader.LoadTest(String testName)

The typo-squatter top level domain .cm is being used to take your .com typo of .cm and give you a page you didn't really want (e.g. microsoft.cm instead of microsoft.com). Here is an easy way to avoid the .cm typo in IE:

1. Type the domain name minus the suffix in the URL  (e.g. microsoft)
2. Press the keys: CTRL+SHIFT+Enter

A www. will be added to the front of the name and a .com will be added to the end. Avoid the .com typo-squatters with IE shortcuts!

I pay a lot of attention to what brings people into QAInsight.net and I have to say I'm surprised, disappointed, and flabbergasted by what people are interested in...

I want people to be interested in QAInsight.net due to it's Quality Assurance and testing tool posts, and I've done my best to market it that way by doing things such as allowing my content to be blog farmed at TestingReflections.com so that the posts sit next to other popular QA peoples in the industry (Bret Pettichord, James Bach, etc). Doing this has helped bring in readers and traffic (which is great)! But what bugs me is that my shocklog entries are the traffic drivers for QAInsight.net!?

Check out how my post Six reasons why Robert Scoble is Mini-Microsoft caused a surge:

And how Death toll rises due to FireFox made a mountain out of a mole hill.

I don't get it... People would rather read my gossip and fiction over a QA related post? Hey now, I know, I know. Yes, QA can be boring. Yes, QA doesn't apply to everybody but gossip and fiction sure does.

I like to write both (fact and fiction) but the fiction is hard to swallow because I didn't create the site for that. What are your thoughts? Do you want more "Enquirer" type posts? Should I move those type of entries to a separate category? Should I not change a thing?

A while back Leslie Franke posted a FireFox cheat sheet in a pretty little format suited for printing and hanging on the wall next to your computer. The IE team has done the same for IE7. View and print the Internet Explorer 7 Quick Reference Sheet here. Impress your friends and coworkers with blazing fast surfing skills using only your keyboard!

Amity, Oregon and surrounding communities have been destroyed by what officials and scientists are claiming "FireFox aliens". The death toll is 17,000 and still counting. Officials estimate the toll to rise to 24,000 within the next few days as they survey the rest of the damage.

Surviving residents are enraged with officials since evidence of alien activity emerged as early as August 13th when an a farmer's wheat field in Amity was discovered to have a crop circle that appeared overnight. Survivor Jace Thomeas left town on a hunch, warned officials and contacted local news warning "get the people out, FireFox is coming". Mr. Thomas's warnings went ignored and were actually scoffed at by neighbors.

Few photos exist of the actual destruction as it occurred, simply due to the fact that the devastation brought forth by alien aircraft wiped out electronic devices using electro-magnetic-gamma-particle technologies. Officials have released one color distorted image obtained from a 30MM camera found under and overturned water truck. Those who survived describe the same awful scene as seen in the released photo. "A red and orange orb emerged from the sky and moved along the inhabited terrain destroying everything in it's path using some sort of invisible force that had the power of a tornado". "The sound was terrible, the screaming and crying as people ran from the spaceship was unbearable".

Officials are aware of the advice but aren't relaying it until their investigations are complete. Meanwhile, uninformed surrounding towns are trying to get as far away as possible. The massive rush to escape has clogged interstate-5 and traffic is at a halt. Desperate families wanting to survive are leaving cars in the middle of the highway and moving North by foot.

Nearby OSU students are trying to dispel the few facts that are slowly working through the towns with propaganda stating that the "Firefox Crop Circle project shows that we have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space". The propaganda comes too late for surrounding towns as they are now seeing and experiencing the pain of the once beautiful, neighboring town Amity.

If you find yourself reading this article using FireFox, save your own life, download and install the latest verion of IE immediately. It's only a matter of time before those FireFox thingies will be back.

I don't know about you but I'm always losing my copy-paste functionality between my Remote Desktop Connection and my desktop (always as in at least once a week). This is a pain in the ass from the testing perspective because I do a lot of copying and pasting. Over time I've discovered that the best way to repair this is to kill RDPClip.exe on the machine you've remoted into and then restart the thread:

1. Open Task Manager, highlight RDPClip.exe and click the "End Process" button
2. Click the "Applications" tab, click the "New Task" button, and type the text "RDPClip.exe"

This works for me 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time it won't and a reboot of the machine you've remoted into will guarantee the fix. I know, SUCK. But hey it's only 5%, and thats better than 95%.

Here's a forum where people claim the issue is UserDump.exe, but it never has been in my situtation.

A while ago I subscribed to and regularly read Jeff Attwood's CodingHorror.com blog where he spends a lot of time talking about the horror of bad design and code. Once in a while Jeff talks about hardware and throws out some interesting ditties. In his recent hardware related post Jeff says: "With the release of Intel's Core Duo and Core Duo 2 chips, it's finally happened-- mainstream video card GPUs are about to overtake CPUs as the largest consumers of power inside your PC". The post is chalked full of statistics and pretty graphs showing you power consumption of mainstream video cards and CPUs.

It will be interesting to see how the video card market responds to their power consumption issues. What magic does AMD have up their sleeve with the purchase of ATI? They were quick to say they will have CPU and GPU integration and lower power consumption. Will Intel get back into the video card game? An insider's theory says "Yes". What will Intel do though? With their new CPUs and motherboards, will they too merge the GPU and CPU or will they make lower power consumption graphic cards using Core 2 Duo technologies?

Robert Scoble I'm onto you. I know you are Mr. Mini-Microsoft. Now, now before you roll your eyes and move on thinking this is just another half-hearted accusation lets go over my evidence. You see, I've been doing some Scobleizer and Mini-Microsoft blog forensics and have found some small facts that create some decent theories which lead me to believe that you are the person responsible for Mini-Microsoft. It's all good, I'm a fan and a reader of both but you challenged us Scoble... You wanted to be anonymous. Being anonymous begged us to find who was responsible. That person is you. I know you know! But now the world must know. This is what I know:

It's easiest to explain by walking through a timeline. So I'll start from the beginning:

Theory #1
Scoble was hired by Microsoft in 05/2003 and started blogging shortly after in 09/2003. Mini-Microsoft was started in 07/2004.

In theory, after blogging for nearly a year with fear of losing his job for saying too much Scoble decided to find a better way to say what he wanted without that fear. Thus, Mini-Microsoft was born.

Theory #2
Wordpress vs. Blogger. Wordpress for Scobleizer,  Blogger for Mini-Microsoft. They aren't the same. Switching it up so that we see no similarities. Subtle Scoble, subtle. You almost had me there!

Theory #3
This is my favorite piece of evidence. It was right there in front of us but we were too lazy to put the pieces together! We all know that Robert's Mom grew sick and passed away in 05/2006 (I'm sorry Robert, my thoughts and prayers are with your family). During this time of support for his Mom Robert left work to be with her and if you follow his posts you'll know that he wrote some occasional heart-wrenching posts about his Mom and his feelings as he went through this tough time. Mini-Microsoft went dry during this time. Here are the ever-so-convincing post timelines:

May 7th
Scobleizer: Last Microsoft/tech related post
Mini-Microsoft: Microsoft related post

May 8th
Scobleizer: Does a personal post about Mom's condition and how he's heading to Montana the next day

May 9th-18th
Scobleizer: No Microsoft/tech related posts. Only posts about the current Mom situation.
Mini-Microsoft: Absolutely no posts. Nothing. Nada. Why would he? He's preoccupied!

May 19th
Scobleizer: He posts Back in the land of bandwidth and cell phones
Mini-Microsoft: He posts Still here

Theory #4
The post times don't overlap. For example take this sampling of post times (as received by NewsGator):

Scobleizer	Mini-Microsoft
Thu 7/20/2006 8:50 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 8:32 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 8:11 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 5:50 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:25 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:23 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 3:20 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 2:49 PM
Thu 7/20/2006 11:13 AM
Thu 7/20/2006 10:58 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 8:22 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 8:16 PM
	Thu 7/20/2006 6:05 AM
	Thu 7/20/2006 2:52 AM
	Wed 7/19/2006 8:14 PM
	Wed 7/19/2006 11:30 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:57 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:33 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:15 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:15 AM
Wed 7/19/2006 3:01 AM
Tue 7/18/2006 5:20 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 4:37 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 3:28 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 3:19 PM
	Tue 7/18/2006 3:18 PM
Tue 7/18/2006 12:57 PM
	Tue 7/18/2006 11:21 AM
	Tue 7/18/2006 11:10 AM

Theory #5
Duplicate coverage of news between the 2 blogs didn't happen often. For example when Bill Gates decided to leave Microsoft Mini-Microsoft mentioned it but Scobleizer didn't. Odd, why wouldn't the Scobleizer mention somebody he respected and worked for?

Theory #6
Since Scoble quite Microsoft on 07/01/2006 there has been no juicy inside info on Mini-Microsoft. The posts are thoughts on information we all were already privy to.

So there you have it... I think Scoble wanted to be exposed though. He got sloppy, but he's too smart to be sloppy! He didn't care anymore. 

Now that you have the monkey off your back Robert you can now breathe a sigh of relief. The calm will eventually come but not too soon. Yes, you will be overwhelmed with questions, yes your integrity may be challenged, but this is nothing new for you and you perform well under the pressure. I believe that what you did is right and was in Microsoft's best interest. Thank you for making Microsoft better Mr. Robert Scoble a.k.a. Mini Microsoft.

Readers, is it a load of BS?! You be the judge. The data is the data. The theories are... well theories. Time will tell. Either Scoble confesses or we decide with further evidence (e.g. Mini-Microsoft gives us no more juicy inside info since Scoble is no longer on the inside).

So I was visiting friends in Redmond this week and happened to run across Robert Scoble on a street off of highway 908 in Redmond:

I took this picture with my wife's camera phone as we were passing. Seeing him in Redding surprised me because I thought he left for California? So what is the REAL story Scoble? Were you "Laid off"? Are you still working at Microsoft? Are you staying in Redmond to maintain the low-profile Mini-Microsoft blog from local internet cafés? He seems to be in high spirits so he must not be too bad off. It's nice to see that he is maintaining his positive attitude during his time of change.

Has anybody else had a Scoble sighting in Redmond?

eWeek.com has published a pretty good set of screenshots for the Windows Vista build 5472. Get a preview of the good, bad, and ugly here.

Jeff Attwood over at Coding Horror has managed to shrink a fully patched Windows XP Virtual PC down to 641 megabytes.  He gives you full details here. Good stuff. Thanks Jeff!

Internet Explorer beta 3 has been released and can be found here. The IE team and Dave Massy are boast of its new features:

• New icons
• Tab reordering
• Authenticated FTP
• Easy access to email (put it back)
• Small details (for example, image resizing changes)

See some screenshots on the IEBlog.

What's really cool is that the IE team has made, and still is making, EXTRA effort to listen to what users are saying about IE 7 and adding features and improvements based on feedback. If you like, dislike or have an idea about IE7 you can submit your feedback in 3 ways:

My coworker Scott Hanselman recently blogged about his use and experience with the tool Invirtus VM Optimizer. The tool worked well for Scott and his dynamic disk MS Virtual PC images so I looked at how it could improve my fixed disk images. The site didn't reveal anything on improvment for fixed disks so I emailed support at Invirtus to ask about it:

I’m trying to understand how your product would work with a MS VPC that is utilizing the “Fixed Disk” feature. Since the VPC size is fixed will Optimizer shrink it to the smallest size and leave the image unusable (since it won’t don’t dynamically grow)? Or will Optimizer allow me to specify a buffer beyond the optimized size to ensure the VPC doesn’t run out of space?

The reply was:

Optimizer will work with a fixed disk in that it will increase the available free space to the maximum available. But, you cannot shrink the disk itself.

While writing test cases, on the side I converted a fixed disk image to a dynamic disk to see if Optimizer could decrease the 6.3 GB size. The attempt resulted in a slightly LARGER VPC size (6.4 GB). After scratching my head for a while I then emailed support to ask why:

I used your tool with a MS VPC that was a dynamic disk of 6.3 GB. After running the tool the disk ended up being a little over 6.4 GB. The VPC image was VERY clean prior to running of the tool (fresh Server 2003 OS install, SQL 2000, installed two Web Services and a few web sites). Am I missing something or is the tool primarily used for MS VPC bloat that is caused over time VPC? Why did the size go up?

The reply was:

In VM Optimizer we include a tool called Freespace.exe. Freespace.exe goes sector by sector and cleans the whitespace. This means that every sector on your disk is touched and when that happens on a virtual disk the size of the disk expands. However, in a dynamically expanding scenario the size will reduce quite substantially and in your fixed disk scenario the disk will remain approx. the same or grow just slightly.

So, no special magic here for me and my situation. It makes sense; you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. For performance reasons, I converted a  6.3 GB virtual disk image to a 10.1 GB fixed disk image but the caveat is that copying and network transfer a bit painful. I'm assuming that the 3.8 GB difference is free space. My test environment doesn't need this much free space, 1 GB would be enough. At this point I think the only way to get my fixed disk smaller is to specify the free space when converting from dynamic to virtual. Does anybody know a trick for this? Am I looking at a feature request?

Update 6/19: I contacted Ben the Virtual PC Guy to see if he had any tricks up his sleeve for downsizing the free space in a fixed disk and he responded with: "We do not provide a way to change the maximum size of a virtual hard disk today.  If you want to do this you will need to create a new virtual hard disk - at your desired size - and then use a tool like Symantec Ghost to transfer the data to the new virtual hard disk."

Saphire In Steel has written a Ruby IDE for Visual Studio 2005 called Ruby In Steel. This definitely will give a big boost to all the Ruby/Watir browser automation going on right now.

Back at the beginning of 2006 when I was shopping for an automation solution, I gave Ruby and Watir whole-hearted try and was extremely frustrated that I was spending so much time debugging in a JavaScript like world. Can you say "Pain-in-the-ass" and "Inefficient"? Since then I've moved on to SWEA (SW Explorer Automation) and have been EXTREMELY happy debugging in Visual Studio.

For those of you working in the Ruby and Watir world you can download the beta version of Ruby In Steel here. If you want to see it in action you watch a debugging video demo here.

Are you a blogger or blog reader? Are you a fan of syndication? Let me present the latest in geek t-shirts for RSS. I had this one on the back burner since I started this blog in December of 2005 and finally sat down to create it tonight. This master-piece is titled "Feed Me" (I won't be offended if you consider it a master-POS). The image below requires ShockWave-Flash. If you can't see it, just go to Zazzle.com where this little beauty resides. Do you hate black t-shirts or would rather a sweat-shirt or tank top? Zazzle has a huge product line-up that you can place this advertising gem on. Gem you say? Yes, this is THE official RSS icon to be recognized by a cajillion internet users by 2007. TRUST ME. Don't be a "wanna-be" by displaying your syndication spirit in 2008. Get this frickin' thing on your chest now!

This week I spent time testing a new Web Service feature in our product IA that utilized SOAP headers. Testing started with scripting my typical functional, use, and boundary tests in SOATest and then wrapping up with my basic security tests (URL encoding, SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, etc). Before moving on I spent a bit of time perusing the Web for SOAP header security exploits to see if I could expand my security test suite for this particular feature. The search didn't yield anything significant but I was re-reminded in my search of a few great papers on Web Service and SOAP security:

• OWASP Guide
• SpyDynamics SOAP Web Security
• Moustafa M. Arafa's Web Service Security
• Tony Palmer's Don't drop the SOAP

Last year I wrote about how I tried to get on the Google Analytics band-wagon but was denied. After sitting at my PC and clicking the Send/Receive button every 10 seconds for the last 6 months the invite finally showed up. Good thing, I was getting discouraged (and my click finger was severely cramped). So, today I finally received an email from Google stating:

"We are ready for you to create your Google Analytics account! Please follow the instructions below to redeem your invitation code."

Sweet! Now I can see where you folks are from. I already know that I have readers in China. For some odd reason they are only interested in the hacking errr.. I mean "testing" posts.

Last week I spent a bit of time to better understand the different disk options that are available in Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. I was particularly interested in finding the best performance and the best option for having multiple environments that had subtle changes between them (OS and SQL Service Packs, and test app versions). Before I tell you my findings, let me point out a few simple facts about Virtual PC (from my experience):

• The "Fixed Disk" option is faster than a "Dynamic Disk". Dynamic grows the file which is slow but Fixed doesn't.
• Enabling the "Undo Disk" for any disk type will create a temporary Dynamic Disk that contains all the changes for that session. When you close the Virtual PC down you then have the option to merge the changes from your temporary disk back to the main Physical or Dynamic Disk. Undo disks are slow since the temporary disk is dynamic.

Remember these facts, its important going forward :)

The hope of Differencing Disks
In my little mission, I first looked into the details of what a "Differencing Disk" was. In summary a Differencing Disk gives you the option of having a 2nd Dynamic Disk attached to a main Physical or Dynamic Disk. This 2nd Dynamic Disk holds only the differences from the main disk. This is the ticket I needed to have multiple environments that had subtle changes between them. An image from the VPC help file shows the power of this, the Windows 2000 disk represents the main disk while the others are Differencing Disks with different IE browsers installed:

I found that the disadvantages of a Differencing Disk are:

• The Differencing Disk size can grow larger than the main disks size over time so you don't really save space
• Differencing Disks are dynamic and can not be fixed, thus slower.
• Adding an Undo Disk to a Differencing Disk only adds to the slowness

Here is a step by step on how to create a Differencing Disk at Matt's blog.

Making an Undo Disk into a Differencing Disk
After realizing the good and bad of Differencing Disk I found an article at Invertus.com that explained how to make an Undo Disk into a more efficient Differencing Disk. I tried this out and the file size stayed smaller but the VPC was still slow. Adding the Undo Disk only made slowness worse (about the same as a plain ol' Differencing Disk).

Fixed Disks
Since Fixed Disks are fixed in size the pain of a dynamically resizing file is gone so this is the speediest option. The downfall to a Fixed Disk is that the VPC sizes are large, so if you have as many images as you saw in the picture above at about 10 GBs a piece then you can eat up drive space pretty quickly.

Conclusion
When needing multiple environments if you want speed use a Fixed Disk. If you are worried about disk space use Matt's technique for making an Undo Disk into a Differencing Disk. If you want to keep an environment clean you can either use an Undo Disk and deal with the slowness or you can sacrifice disk space by instead keeping backup copies and copying over the dirty image when you are done with it (doubling your disk space usage).

Finally, Microsoft has released some serious requirements for their new OS in the works: Windows Vista. Requirments are broken down into two categories:

A Windows Vista Capable PC includes at least:

    * A modern processor (at least 800MHz1).
    * 512 MB of system memory.
    * A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:

    * 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
    * 1 GB of system memory.
    * A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero2.
    * 128 MB of graphics memory.
    * 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
    * DVD-ROM Drive3.
    * Audio output capability.
    * Internet access capability.

Want more info? Visit the Windows Vista Get Ready site here.

Today I sat down and started to configure my new test environments which are hosted on Microsoft Virtual PCs. I wanted to refresh myself on some of the advanced features and hit Google, Microsoft and MSDN in search of the VPC user documentation that I had found about a year ago and then proceeded to lose. Long story short, don't go looking on the Web for the official user manual for Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, it's under your nose. A MS kb article reminded me of the painful unobvious that I learned once before:

"In a default installation of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, the documentation that is included with Virtual PC is located in the following folder on the hard disk of the host PC: Drive:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Documentation"

Painfully unobvious because there are no shortcuts from Start menu to this documentation (which is where I started my search).

In my quest for documenation I ran into the following useful MS VPC 2004 links too:

The Official Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 site is here.

A MSDN VPC Blog is here.

VPC Overview Presentations are here.

Over the last 2 days I had the opportunity to remove the SQL 2000 database out from underneath our Web Service and replace it with SQL 2005. The team was hoping to see an instant gain in SQL performance but that's not what happened. Performance tests that put the SQL 2000 server at a comfy 69% CPU usage were now using 81% with SQL 2005. Bummer. Where's the magic Microsoft? Keep in mind we made ZERO changes to the Web Service or SProcs for the test.

We're not going to give up hope on gaining performance with SQL 2005, the move is just going to be slower for us now since we obviously need to uncover the magic and finding that magic is going to take some work. During this SQL upgrade test I learned a few interesting things that I suppose I should share with you...

• I couldn't successfully restore a SQL 2000 database backup to my database in SQL 2005. I had a few errors thrown at me but this is one that I documented: "Restore failed for Server 'TEST-SQL1'. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo), Additional information: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlError: The backup set holds a backup of a database other than the existing "TEST" database. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Smo)"
• The SQL2000 database couldn't be attached in SQL2005 and used successfully. For some reason, when I attached my 1 million+ entry database my largest table was empty?!
• Does attaching to a 2000 .MDF in 2005 migrate the data? According to a forum post by an engineer on the MS SQL 2005 development team, it does migrate the system tables but he says nothing about the custom tables. I couldn't find any other info on the web on how to migrate data other than using the attach feature as described by ASPFree.com. Microsoft has an upgrade advisor tool but it doesn't upgrade anything it just does analysis.

Have YOU bben drinking the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid? It appears that I have. Figure out if you did with the quiz Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character.

Is AJAX worth the effort? Looking at Eric Holton's unofficial test tells me there isn't much of performance advantage (With AJAX: 3.24 seconds; without AJAX: 3.36 seconds). There's not much detail about the test but it feels legit.

Over at Cedric's Weblog, Cedric has some thoughts on why Ruby on Rails won't become mainstream:

"So why do I think that Ruby on Rails will never cross the chasm?"

Cedric explains the following reasons:

• First of all, Ruby.
   
• Ruby on Rails itself.
   
• Still no credible IDE.
   
• Fanaticism.
   
• Crowd of a single mind.
   
• Enterprise capabilities and scalability unclear.

Read the full article here.

"Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August"

Boot Camp will be available as a feature in OSX 10.5 "Leopard", but you can download a trial preview of Boot Camp now. Read more at Apple.com.

Microsoft has made their Virtual Server software free. It'll be interesting to watch VMWare and Virtual Server battle. Any of us who have used virtual machine software know that performance can be really annoying. Has anybody seen any good performance comparisons?

The movie Office Space has been made into a fun little online Flash game. In the game you act as Peter Gibbons trying to complete the mission: "It's Friday afternoon and you just know that Lumbergh is gonna ask you to come in on Saturday. Finish all you TPS reports and sneak out the side door before Lambergh catches up with you!".

Play for Milton's honor.

Milton: "And I said, I don't care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I'm, I'm quitting, I'm going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they've moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married, but then, they switched from the Swingline to the Boston stapler, but I kept my Swingline stapler because it didn't bind up as much, and I kept the staples for the Swingline stapler and it's not okay because if they take my stapler then I'll set the building on fire..."

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote an interesting article about Ruby on Rails here. Between the article, and the embedded links the following quotes bug the crap out of me:

• Ruby on rails is: "a stack that contains components for most Web applications."

Most. Heh. Wow, that's really gonna suck when a team is fully invested/committed to Ruby on Rails and they come up with a need for something that's not in the "stack". Now, not only does the team need to figure out how to use the new/needed technology but they must also figure out how to integrate the technology into the Ruby on Rails stack. Fun! More work in a project with doesn't have enough hours already.

• Ruby makes: "what most people do most of the time extremely easy"

Most...Heh. Ditto

• "37signals not only built their 5 world-class online applications purely with Ruby on Rails, but they support almost 400,000 users on just 13 servers."

How vague is that? 400,000 what? Concurrent users with sessions? Doing what? Do you mean 400,000 enrolled users in the database? That's a sad, "world-class" hardware hog (13 servers). Let me see here, the development is faster with Ruby on Rails (saving money) but they bought 10 more servers than the typical 400,000 enrolled user database needs.

When I put it all together in my head my summary is this: Ruby on Rails is like Ebonics for developers.

Hey, have you heard about the new language taking Web 2.1 by storm? Oh yeah, by storm! It's called LAZY. What's really cool about LAZY is that you don't have to learn Ruby or JavaScript to use AJAX. The LAZY framework wraps Ruby, which wraps JavaScript which makes your AJAX programming a no-brainer. A wrapper, for a wrapper. Truly LAZY!

Ruby on Rails may be easier for development of most Web applications (a quoted 80% by David Heinemeier Hannson) but seriously, the same thing can be done with existing languages. Yes, Ruby on Rails/Ebonics has come to market faster than the other languages and because of that the other languages will be forced to get Web 2.0 savvy quickly. But Ruby on Rails has a lot of work to do on their "stack". Take .NET for example, let's say it takes Microsoft 2 years to Ebonicize so that you can do things like program AJAX quickly and easily. Once those Ebonics are in place you have access to a deep and extensive set of libraries that are baked. Ruby on Rails will building their "stack" for many years to come.

After a year of himming and hawing I finally broke down and purchased myself a video card to go with my P4-3.4Ghz PC that I purchased around XMAS 2004. This is how cheap I am: Since I purchased my top of the line PC in 2004 I've been running a 16MB PCI video card on it. A brand new system with a piece of crap video card. Kind of defeats the purpose eh?Yeah...I'm cheap. I was holding out for something that would do video-in (for video editing) as well as have a top of the line chipset that could handle the latest game, all for under $200....Rrrrrrright.

I gave up on the video-in, since there are so many external solutions that you can purchase for under $100, and decided to go shopping for the best that money can buy with $200. Co-worker Mr. Alex Scoble pointed me to the massive selections out at NewEgg.com and we filtered our way down to what I considered the best for my needs, the SAPPHIRE Radeon X850XT. The best thing about the 850XT is that I satisfied my cheap "habit" with the low, low price of $164.00. Check out these specifications:

Chipset Manufacturer: ATI
GPU Radeon: X850XT
Core clock: 520MHz
PixelPipelines: 16
Memory Clock:1080MHz
Memory Size: 256MB
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Memory Type: GDDR3

The specs are really impressive for less than $200! We couldn't find any NVidia cards that could compete in the price range that had 256MB memory, 16 pipelines, and have an interface of 256-bit. Sure the clock speed is not the fastest, but for my gaming needs I choose shading over speed which resulted in this card.

I received the card today and proceeded to install it as soon as I got home. Installation was quick and painless. In little to no time I had my long awaited dual monitors set up and was playing Call of Duty 2. With the game defaults I didn't see one pause on the first level. For the 2nd level I turned the dial from default to maximum EVERYTHING at 1024x768 which only caused occasional, very tiny pauses.

I'm happy. The SAPPHIRE Radeon X850XT from NewEgg.com has so far proven to be a good decision.

I somehow find this Super Mario Brothers race more fun and exciting than the 2006 Winter Olympics. What's wrong with me? I think I find it more interesting because I can relate to it. Think about it, the typical IT guy competes to survive using mouse clicks, response times and wit. I just can't get into figure skating. For the 2012 IT Olympics I'd like to see the following events:

• Double click: "athletes" compete to double click the fastest (left, middle, and right click). Athletes are judged on speed and technique.
• Inbox filing: "athletes" compete to file the contents of an inbox into junk, delete, postpone, and act now. Judges score on filing decisions and the possible impact of those decisions on the virtual business.
• Windows Installation: "athletes" compete to install Window Vista the fastest (no install scripts allowed). Athletes are judged on install time and ability to multitask during long waits.

What IT events would you like to see in 2012?

Oh, I almost forgot... When I was a kid my cousin was so good at Super Mario Brothers that he could complete the first level with his eyes shut. It was pretty cool to watch. Now that's what I call skill.

Google Earth and Google Maps have given us a whole new way to express ourselves using their satellite imagery. People are going crazy showing us their art, graffiti, and advertising from the bird's eye view. I wonder how long it will take before somebody figures out the photographic path and schedule of the satellites. Just think how much graffiti some young, punk, geek could do if he knew when and where the next picture was being taken. Want to make a bet on when the first wedding proposal happens? How can she say "no" to such geekiness?

See Target's new form of advertising here. See modern day tagging with profanity here. Recently I got in on the craze and put a little advertisement for QAInsight.net on the roof of my house (see blog post picture).

Google has an awesome technology here, but let's kick it up one more notch. Here's my challenge to you Google:

• Allow registration of land coordinates to the land owner. Require meta-data input such as address, URL, rent or own. Lease city and utility meta-data to corporations: cable, phone, public sewer, FIOS, etc...
• Allow people to click on registered coordinates. Clicking directs the user to URL specified by land owner.
• Allow the meta-data to be searched and graphed. Imagine the power for house buying, rental search, track the creeping FIOS installation across town...

So I come home from work the other day and find that my home PC is shut down. I mumble to myself, "Damn kids, messing with my stuff again". When I turn it back on I'm greeted with charming rhythmic beeps and nice little message from Intel stating that my PC overheated and automatically shut down (sorry kids, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions). Wonderful. Ignoring all the prompts to have the PC inspected by a professional I pushed my PC back to life with a few key presses and before you know it I'm back into Windows.  Firing up Intel's Desktop Control Center displayed a CPU Zone in the red with about 175 degrees Fahrenheit (not far from the "Captain, she can't take more" limit). Peering in through the clear fiberglass beyond the flashing neon blue lights as data pulsated through the system I could see 4 dust bunny encrusted fans working away as expected (1 CPU, 2 case, 1 power supply). Could it be the dust causing my headache? Excited to get out my can of compressed air, I fumbled through my drawers of outdated PC parts to find a half full can of air. Resisting the urge to sneak up behind my wife and shoot some cold air on the back of her neck (because I'm evil like that), I resorted to the less fun, but definitely fun task of shooting compressed air into all the nooks and crannies of my PC sending billowing clouds of dust out onto the carpet and surrounding area. The only way to ensure that dust was indeed the problem was to leave the PC running and view the CPU Zone Temp. on the fly, adding an extra element of danger (so they say). Instant results revealed themselves via the Intel Desktop Control Center when my CPU Zone temperature started to average 115 degrees Fahrenheit and stayed there:

Moral of the story: Blow the dust out of your PC more than once a year.

While testing Web applications I naturally find myself constantly messing with IIS. Stopping, starting, clearing logs, etc. As with most applications, it can be so much quicker and easier to do things from the command line. Recently while performance testing I was constantly needing to Stop and start IIS as well as recycle the application pool. Here are those commands for Server 2003:

To stop the web server:

net stop w3svc

To start the Web server:

net stop w3svc

To stop and start the Web server:

iisreset

To recycle the application pool:

iisapp /p <PID> /r

iisapp /a <App_Pool_ID> /r

If you're not sure what the PID or App_Pool_ID is then just use the command iisapp with no switches to print the list.

I struggle with writing. I like writing (especially this blog) but it doesn’t come easy for me and I’m not as fast as I’d like to be. I want to be better at conveying feeling. Technical writing I feel comfortable with though (dang… I better, with 8+ years of writing test plans, cases, defects, steps to reproduce). I really admire bloggers like Greg Hughes and Rory Blyth who convey emotion in their entries. They always have a way of putting a smile on my face. Greg, with being just plain personal and Rory by documenting his insaneness. I’d like to be funny and personal (like them) while remaining technical. Possible? I think so, it’ll just take time.

Recently from some blog’s link to a link to a link to a site I found some advice for aspiring writers that touched on the fundamentals of writing. The site is John Scalzi’s blog and John is a professional writer (who recently just published The Ghost Brigades). Anyway, his advice is fundamental, funny, and important. If you write, this is worth reading.

Starting with John’s overall advice, and then reading people who I think write well,  I think I may just have a chance at this blogging thing! 

Do you want a free $5.00? No really, a FREE $5.00. No catches. You can get that $5.00 for signing up with the new service called TextPayMe. The service provides you with the ability to send money to other TextPayMe members via your cell phone using text messaging. No more unpaid IOUs. You know what I'm talking about, you keep forgetting to pay those IOUs back don't you? C'mon you, that's not fair to your friends and co-workers. They did you a favor by temporarily footing the bill and this is how you treat them in return? Because of your forgetfulness your so called friend is calling you a flake, cheapskate, mooch, rat, welch, stiff, swindle, and loser behind your back! Yeah, that hurts. I know, I know... "you forgot". It's not like you were sitting on the extra cash in your bank account gaining interest on YOUR FRIEND'S MONEY. You've got a "problem" buddy. Solve your "problem" instantly over the phone with a simple text message such as "pay 3 2065551234". It'll come in handy for things like:

- Split your restaurant bills right then and there!
- Pay your team or club dues anywhere and anytime
- Pitch in real money instead of IOUs for a shared gift
- Settle your roommate's rent and utility bills on the

Pretty cool...technology and all. Times have changed (so Grandpa portrays in his stories about pushing wheelbarrows of gold coins 12 miles uphill through snow to pay off a 1 month old IOU to his bookie that had an astonishingly low interest rate of 3.2%).

Seriously, TextPayMe is a pretty handy service. Click the ad below and sign up!

I HATE DRM (Digital Rights Management). I understand the intent and I think the concern is valid, but consumers are suffering because they can't put a system in place that works. With recent music CD purchases, and attempts to rip them, it's been nothing but a pain in my ass; purchases being Santana-All That I Am & VanZant-Get Right With the Man (both Sony-BMG). Why is ripping my music important to me? Because I can fit hundreds of songs on a CD and listen to them in the car. My in-dash CD/MP3 player holds 6 CDs. Six CDs of MP3s is VERY convenient in the car. My process is simple: I buy a few CDs, I rip them, I burn them to CD and then I put the original CD into a big box out of the way in the garage.

To better understand my frustration let me tell you what I want as a consumer. The list is short:

• MP3 format. My reason:
  • I don't want to use a proprietary format.
  • I've ripped every CD I've acquired over the last 15 years to MP3 already. I want to keep my collection consistent.
• Bit-rate equal to or greater than 192kbps. My reason:
  • Less than 192kpbs can be detected by the human ear. =>192kbps can't.

Is that so freakin' hard?

Attempting to rip the above CDs using my own applications, and a few that I wouldn't normally use recommended by friends, resulted in pauses in all the songs, and in some cases the song wouldn't even rip. The lame DRM alternative? Install and use the MediaMax software conveniently located on the CD. The software gives you the option to rip the CD in the WMA format at 128kpbs; both not up to my needs and standards. ARGHHH!

The workaround? Burn it on a Mac with ITunes. Yeah, I said it... Use a Mac. Whatever DRM technique that Sony-BMG uses to prevent you from ripping on a PC doesn't work on the Mac. I don't have a Mac, so I have my friend who owns a Mac do it for me. It seems to me that the workaround is self defeating for DRM. Whose to say my friend didn't make his/her own copy when they ripped it for me? That potential copyright issue could be prevented IF I COULD JUST FREAKIN' RIP THE CD I PAYED FOR TO MP3 @192KBPS!

Did you ever wish that you didn't sell your Sega 16, NES or ColecoVision at that garage sale for $5.00? Do you miss those classic games like ExiteBike, Super Marion Bros., Goonies, Mrs. Pacman, and Donkey Kong? The other day Alex pointed me to http://www.game-oldies.com to help relive those days when games were games and not simulators to help make you a precise killing machine. Game-Oldies has 1137 games, runs on JRE 5.0, and is addicting. The Java emulator does a decent job but the game-play can get slow and a bit annoying when your system is doing other things in the background. Is it legal? Beats me. Time will tell.

Hey, can you beat 1:01 on the first race in ExciteBike? BRING IT, DON'T SING IT...

A spammer from Florida has been slapped with an 11 BILLION dollar fine for sending out 280 million spam e-mails. The number equates to $10 an e-mail the economic equivalent of the death penalty:

However, Kramer said he intends to take the spammers for every penny they have. "I will seek the economic equivalent of the death penalty,"

I’m the webmaster for ReedvilleBaseball.com and I just sent out 400 emails for Spring baseball registrations. A couple of people replied to me asking me why they were on the list and to take them off (The list came from last years registrations). What if one of those people decided to sue Reedville Baseball? That equates to $4000… That doesn’t work very well for our non-profit organization.

My friend and coworker Alex Scoble showed me how to remotely connect to the console session of a Server 2003 machine the other day. You can do this three ways:

1. From the command line type: mstsc -v:YourIPhere -console
2. From the RDP connection GUI add /Console after the machine name
3. Edit the RDP file (open in Notepad) and add the following line to the end of the file: connect to console:i:1

Why use the console switch? Three reasons as far as I can tell:

1. You can log onto the existing console session and not have to reopen your applications.
2. Some applications can only be ran from the console.
3. Hear audio at the Server.

Console switches aren't needed when connecting to a Windows XP Pro machine because XP will automatically and only connect as console.

There are a few other command line parameters. They are listed and defined here.

Over the holidays I took the opportunity to install the Windows Vista CTP Build 5270. I wasn't about to take the risk of destroying any of my current Window installations so I thought I'd give it a whirl with Microsoft Virtual PC. I knew this would probably be a challenge, Virtual PC on an IBM T42 laptop, but I had the time. All in all my experience was... typical.

Installation
Attempt #1: Enter the key, accept the terms, select installation type (upgrade or custom) and then select the install location. This is where my first hang-up occurred. The disk was showing as unallocated and also wanted 16 GBs to install. Hmmm... 16 Gigs, okay, if you say so. Problem was that the disk was marked as unallocated and the wizard wouldn't let me do anything about it. So I exited out of the install and created a partition in hope that the installer would see it.

Attempt #2: Enter the key, accept the terms, select installation type (upgrade or custom) and then select the install location. The disk still showed as unallocated but this time I was able to work around it by selecting the "New" link. At this point I'd thought I'd try to cheat the system and create an 8 Gig partition. No go. I could select 8 Gigs but would get an error when proceeding on. After I allocated the 8 Gigs, I was given the format option. A quick format and I was prompted with "Windows will now finish installing automatically". SWEET! I watched the progress bar slowly work its way up to the half way point where it decided to stay for a LOOONG time. I'm talking hours. I still hadn't lost hope until I started Googling around for other Vista install experiences and found that one person had installed it within 20 minutes (not on a VPC). Twenty minutes? I've been stuck on the half way point for nearly 3 hours now. At this point I started to question whether or not the drive could read the CD correctly. The light was blinking every once in a while; it just didn't seem aggressive enough. My patience had run thin and the braggart with the 20 minute install got me thinking something was wrong. So, I popped out the CD and checked it for smudges. Nope, looks good. I put the CD back in and was rudely rejected by the Vista installer. The installer had decided it was going to quit without the CD and it didn't give me the option to try to point back to the CD. They should change that one button alert box text to something like "Damned if you do, damned if don't. Click here stupid". Ouch...

Attempt #3: Enter the key, accept the terms, blah, blah, and there I was again waiting patiently at the half-way indicator. Still not discouraged from my experience I looked at the progress indicator as half full and not half empty. I wasn't going to wait around this time though. So I set my laptop on my chair and did some things around the house while it tried to break the half-way mark. When checking in about an hour later I found my laptop turned off. What the F... Picking up my laptop revealed that it was hot. A little too hot. Looks as though it overheated and shut itself down (no, the side vents weren't blocked. Only the bottom). The fact that it shut down was good for my laptop and bad for Vista . Ok, note to myself...Don't put laptop down micro-fiber chair while installing Vista .

Attempt #4: PROP LAPTOP UP IN PRECARIOUS POSITION ON MICRO-FIBER CHAIR. Enter the key, accept the terms, blah, blah, watch the progress meter go to half way, and go to bed. When I woke in the morning and checked in I was happy to see a prompt for Country selection. Woohoo! I worked my way through 5 more install screens and the Vista desktop appeared before my eyes (Albeit ugly at 640x480 with 16 colors). I fixed this by running the "Install or Update Virtual Machine Additions” from within the VPC. Whew...I did it!

In a nutshell, Vista took me one whole day to install with Microsoft Virtual PC. Granted, it could have been quicker if I hadn't popped the CD out on try #2 but c'mon.... the progress bar was stuck at half-way for 3 hours.

Desktop Experience
First visual impression.... pretty and Mac like. I was surprised to see that when Vista came up for the first time I had a network connection even though the setup doesn't ask for the configuration. Impressive? Scary! My wireless network is encrypted and requires a key and I didn't put it in.... So either I was connected to the neighbor's unprotected network or the VPC was magically porting my connection through the laptop's wireless connection. It seemed to be the later. Looking through Vista's " Network Center " revealed little to nothing about where my network connection was coming from (wireless vs. local area connection). The Control Panel's Network List revealed a bit more info. I did have a wireless connection but it wasn't connected. My IP address revealed an IP delivered from router, so I assume it had to be running through the current laptop's connection but had acquired my own IP for the VPC. Maybe this network tunnel was the reason for the stuck at half-way progress bar? Only Billy Wonka knows.

Under VPC....the experience is SLOW. My laptop has a Pentium M 1.8 GHz with 2 GB RAM and I allocated 1 GB of RAM to the virtual machine. It seems like it would help out a bit but it didn't. The slowness is practically unbearable. In my enthusiasm to check out the cool new features I suffered through waiting 5-10 seconds for each mouse over, click and window load. Upping the priority to High or Real-time for VirtualPC.exe within Task Manager helps a bit but can cause VPC lockups when running some things that are graphic intensive (like Media Center or the new Game " Purble Palace ").

The new features are pretty cool though. Lots of new stuff to sort through: Windows Mail, Media Center , Media Player 11, Internet Explorer 7, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Defender and Parental Controls (I'm really excited to lock the kids out of their PC on timed intervals). I like the new look and feel (the circular start button is outside of the box). I'm sold. Why? I can see the usability is better. No longer will I have to spend so much time maintaining the wife and kids computers (ages 33, 15, and 11. Each has their own PC). I think things are so self explanatory that THEY can do a lot of the things that I spend so much time setting up and doing for them (Virus scanning, SpyWare, OS updates, network configuration). Also, the DEFAULT security is going to help the misinformed, unknowing and absent minded users. Vista is a great leap in helping users regain control of their computer (if I had a nickel for every friend and family member that wanted to buy a new computer because theirs was too slow. Later, after installing a few recommended basic tools, I reveal to them that it was riddled with SpyWare and viruses).

I like it! I don't like it in a VPC though...Too SLOW and the install is misleading.

Check out TheElderGeekVista.com. He took the time to take screenshots of his similar experience.

Did you know that you can run you Remote Desktop sessions from the MMC? Yep, it's possible and it's pretty cool! The left pane contains the machine names while the right pane contains the Remote Desktop instance. This is pretty handy when you've got multiple RDCs going (while testing I often have 2 to 3 open at a time) or if you simply just want to store all you RDC profiles in a Windows Explorer type fashion. The snap-in is part of the Admin Pack that comes with Server 2003. It will work with Server 2003 or XP Pro. You can find it on the 2003 CD in the i386 directory or download it from Microsoft here (adminpak.msi). Once you've run adminpak.msi, open MMC (Start > Run > Type "MMC") and add the snap-in "Remote Desktop". Once the snap-in is added, right click "Remote Desktops" in the left pane and select "Add New Connection". The remainder of the RDC setup is self explanatory....

Thanks for the tip Mark!

Oops, I forgot to send my list off to Santa year. Actually it's not really a list, it's a simple 2 item request: I want "an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time..." and an XBox 360. I know, I know.. "You'll shoot your eye out kid" (if Santa only knew what kind of weapons these console games have now days). With two more days left until Christmas I'm pretty sure if I sent off my request via snail-mail it's not going to make it in time. Thank God for technology, I've found a few links that will get the list off quickly through email or instant messages:

If you get this post in time you can email and get a reply within 2 days from here.

You can email and get an INSTANT reply from Ol' Saint Nick here.

You can "Instant Message" Santa here.

Not sure if your request will be granted? Check the naughty and nice list.

What? You sent your list already? If you're bored and waiting for your special delivery you can waste some time out at NorthPole.com. They have a ton of Christmasy things to do to help pass the time:

*Send holiday postcards
*Stories to read & color
*Santa's Birthday Cards
*Games to play
*Christmas Karaoke
*Holiday recipes
*Northpole Wallpaper
*Puzzles & Activities
*Good Deed Calendar
*Visit Elf Pal Academy
*Educational Activities
*Q&A with Santa
*Find the hidden stories
*Naughty or Nice List

Before you know it, Santa and his elves will be packing the big gift bag Christmas Eve day. As Christmas Eve draws in on us make sure and track Santa's progress as he makes his way around the world using NORAD and CONAD. Even better, track him with more precision (within a few feet) using GPS and Google Earth. Don't get too caught up in the tracking, make sure you give yourself plenty of time to set out those cookies & milk and crawl into bed to ensure you're asleep before he arrives.

When it's all said and done you'll need to write a Thank You letter to Santa. Now, if we could only do that online... Does anybody know a site I can do that on?

Everybody around me is using Google Analytics to track visitors and site activity on their blogs.

After looking over shoulders for a while now, I thought it would be pretty cool to install it and take a look at what is going on with QAInsight.net. So I go out to Google Analytics and attempt to sign up. Only to receive the depressing message:

"Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience."

Dang, Google limiting users? Unbelievable! What's next? Limited supplies of XBOX 360s from Microsoft? Oh wait...

No literally, "WAIT".

Testing Web sites all day that require credentials can get really annoying (user: test, password: password). Over the course of the day a tester can achieve a good 100 logons easy. (100 logons) x (5 seconds) = 8.33 minutes a day, (8.33 minutes) x (5 days) = 41.66 minutes a week. You can get those 41 minutes a week back by using the tool RoboForm!

RoboForm provides automated logons from your Web browser toolbar (Internet Explorer, FireFox, & Netscape) and makes logging in effortless (1 click). As a tester it also saves you a lot of time by auto-filling forms for you; this is really nice when you don't actually care about testing the form but the pages that follow the form. I even use RoboForm at home to store all my site credentials. Sounds a bit insecure right? It's not insecure, the credentials are encrypted on the disk, require a master password to access, and the way the auto-login feature works it will actually prevent you from being phished.

In a nutshell, the main features include:

• AutoSave passwords in browser.
• AutoFill passwords to login form.
• Click Login button for you.
• Fill personal info into online forms.
• Save offline passwords & notes.
• Generate Secure Random Passwords.
• Encrypt passwords and personal data using AES, Blowfish, RC6, 3-DES or 1-DES algorithms.
• All personal info is stored on your computer only.
• Take RoboForm with you on USB disk for ultimate portability.
• Sync your passwords and notes to Palm or Pocket PC .
• Backup & Restore , Print your passwords.
• It is well-behaved : NO ADWARE , NO SPYWARE .
• Works under Windows as an add-on to IE-based browsers .
• Works with Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox under Windows.

Download RoboForm here. "It's free to try, $29.99 to buy". Some features are disabled after 30 days (it will limit the number of Passcards you save).

Also, if you're interested in keeping your credentials stored on a USB drive instead of the disk you should take a look at Pass2Go (Portable RoboForm).

My friend and co-worker Mark ran into this the other day while purchasing some software online. Download Insurance? Now, if I understand correctly... You want me to pay $3.95 to hold a copy of MY software on your servers? This just seems wrong to me. First off, if they're going to do this for the customer they shouldn't be charging them.

Why? Here's the reality of it: Your copy is most likely everybody else's copy too. It's not like they're going to archive a special version for you. Don't get me wrong, this is a good idea. It just seems wrong to give the customer the impression that you're doing an extra service for them when the reality of it (if done properly) is that they aren't really doing anything extra, but merely keeping the download version for 18 months along with your key (again, they most likely already do this).

I'm looking forward to seeing how this "Download Insurance" evolves. I don't download music (MP3s) because of the fear of losing the music and not having the source to get it back from. I'm still buying CDs and ripping them. If my hard drive dies I can still re-rip them from CD. If I had FREE "Download Insurance" at ITunes or Napster my problem would be solved and I'd start buying my music online.